“Questions?” Spencer asks as he finishes his presentation and looks around the room with a smile.
“Yes.” One of Cade’s colleagues, who I recognize as the guy who nearly pissed himself when I told him to point me in Cade’s direction, raises his hand. “Do you think your cost model might be ignoring the decoherence effects in the ancilla over time?”
Spencer’s brow furrows as his gaze darts to Cade, who rubs his forehead with a sigh.
“Well,” Spencer says, shifting his attention back to the professor, “the model incorporates those effects in the effectiveHamiltonian, so they aren’t ignored, but treated as part of the system cost.”
“Yes, I understand that, but what about scaling that to non-Markovian regimes?” he asks.
Cade turns his head towards him, levelling him with a look that makes him shrink back in his seat, and makes me smile.
Spencer clears his throat. “As I was saying, the model already accounts for those conditions by extending the cost function to include time-correlated noise. So, no, it’s not neglected.” He glances around the room. “Any other questions?”
No one else puts their hand up.
Excellent.
But as Spencer takes his seat, another student takes the front.
Alright. Enough of this.
As I stand, Cade’s gaze immediately flicks to me. I tilt my head towards the door, then turn and walk out. I lean against the wall just outside the door, facing a fidgety student babysitting his poster across from me.
Until Cade appears.
His dark blue eyes lock on mine as he stands before me, silently waiting for me to explain why I brought him out here. But he already knows why.
“You’re done here,” I say.
His chin lifts, and his eyes narrow slightly. “You think you can just show up and expect me to follow you?”
I push off the wall and close the space between us, lifting a hand to run my fingers over the cable-knit sweater on his chest. “Yes. I do.”
He exhales through his nose and shakes his head. “I can’t just leave.”
“No?” I ask, tilting my head. “Because you looked pretty fucking done in there.”I lean in until I catch the faint smell ofrum on his breath, ignoring the feeling of eyes on us from people down the hall. “And it looks like the rum’s not strong enough for that kind of torture.”
His hands land on my chest, and he pushes me back with a glare that dares me to push harder.
But I just smile, because whatever it was that was missing from him today is flickering back to life.
I shrug and lean against the wall again. “If you need to stay, stay. Your choice.”
Cade doesn’t move as he continues to stand before me, like there’s a war playing out inside him.
But I don’t push and try to convince myself I’ll understand if he chooses to stay.
For whatever fucking reason that would be.
Then, slowly, the corner of his lips tilts up, and his harsh edges soften, just enough to let me in.
I smile. “Let’s fucking ride, baby.”
NINETEEN
As Alder makesthe final turn in a long, winding, tree-lined driveway, a weathered wood cabin comes into view. It’s nestled among trees with a pond in the clearing next to it, where ducks drift lazily across the water, and chickens scratch through the grass. Some of the chickens scatter as Alder’s bike rolls into the yard with a low rumble, but overall, none of them look too fazed.
He kills the engine, and the quiet that follows is a drastic change, filled with the soft metallic notes of wind chimes colliding in no particular rhythm, blending with clucks from around the yard.
